Sunday, October 21, 2007

Farm Fetish Follow-up

In a sign that modern discourse has gone somewhat mad, famous economist Paul Krugman has linked to my old Farm Fetish post. On his New York Timesblog.

In this post I simply point out the ridiculousness of certain politicians, and most of the media, constantly referring to rural small-town Americans as "REAL" Americans (in the cultural sense), considering that according to the US Census and Department of Labor, only 17% of Americans live in rural settings anymore, and roughly 2 million Americans farm for a living. I do this by mentioning that there are more World of Warcraft players in the US than professional Farmers.

Of course, some people have missed the point completely.

There are the comments that farmers produce, while WoW players do not. That farm living has more intrinsic value. That I'm stating urban voters and computer geeks are more "real" Americans, that city dwellers are "out of touch" (with what, for chrissake?)...

Blah blah frikkin' blah. Separated from the context of a discussion of culture, the statistic is indeed meaningless. The point I was making is that in the US many people, including the dominant political commentators and pundits, use as the defining cultural identity for America a cultural identity held by less than 1 in every five citizens. That this is, when given a moment's thought, ridiculous. Any definition of culture which automatically excludes roughly 240 million out of the nation's 300 million citizens is, one would think, inherently ridiculous.

I was using the most opposite identity group I could think of -- computer gamers -- to make my point. Of ridiculousness.

Also -- orc joke. I believe that is the first orc joke ever linked in the New York Times, and I am taking my win and going home.

Right wing politicians and media perpetuate this stereotype of REAL Americans because it helps them win elections. It's more a code word than anything else. George Bush is the candidate for 'real Americans' (people who work for a living, like farmers), whereas John Kerry was for latte drinking elitist homos. Farmers are just used to symbolize in the starkest possible terms the idea of the self-sufficient working man the Republicans feel are their base. This is total BS as farmers are subsidized up the wazoo and more dependent on the government than probably any business in the country, but such is the irony.

I don't know if the media uses farmers as "What America Thinks" but more as "What The Other 50% Of America Thinks", a counter-point to what the average city dweller thinks.

From the statistics of who voted for Bush last election, older rural males are the right ones to ask for an opposing view. They don't have to be farmers, they could be tractor salesmen, mechanics, or anybody else peripherally connected to the farming industry.

I think the main difference is that when politicians pander to people they tell them what they want to hear. For some reason, rural-types like to hear that they're the heart and soul of America, whereas urban Americans just don't.

It is a matter of the myth of America. The Jeffersonian yeoman farmer who reads philosophy and law by lamp light, awakens at dawn to labor on his farm. The self sufficient community that sends its most trusted elders to the state and national seats of power to direct the incidental matters of state and then returns to the earth. It tugs on the heartstrings.

But it is a myth, an illusion, that shelters a real disparity in economic class, education level, and race between political parties. Their heart of America is poor, uneducated, white people that are mostly concerned about their jobs, finances and the peculiarities of their church. And as long as you keep telling these people that they are special and you are protecting them from the bad black-tino homo-atheist terror-crats that want to take away their special place in the sun, they will vote for them.

And to put this in perspective, I am currently writing this from my family's farm. It is not a way to make a living. It is a way of life that I am not following. I am currently waiting for my Bar exam results and didn't want to pay rent. But there is something special about farming that provides an interesting perspecitve on life, but what makes it interesting in modern America is its rarity, not that it is the heart of the country.

That is, seriously, one of my favorite posts of yours and one I often mention to friends, because, seriously, not such a large percentage of voters or citizens as they loom in the imagination. Plus, as you say, orc joke!

The pervasiveness of the lack of clue on this point is interesting. In a comment to a post that makes clear that around 17% of the population is rural, someone here has ALREADY snapped back to the "other 50% of America" bullshit, as opposed to "the average city dweller".

But then, this is really just symptomatic of a similar problem, the notion of the default person. Let's face it, we have, in our culture, a large unexamined assumption about identity. We assume, usually without being aware of it, that the default mode for "human being" is a youngish heterosexual white American male from an upper-middle-class background. This is especially true in fiction.

Those of you about to dismiss the idea, hang on a moment. Notice how much people in fiction are defined by their difference from that default. If a character is black, they're the Black Character. If a character is female, she's the Woman Character. If someone's rich, they're the Rich Character. Likewise for the Poor Character. If, however, you picture a character who does not have any specific tags or modifiers, what do you get? That's right, the default. And he's usually the Big Hero, you'll notice.

Those who wish to dispute this point may begin by explaining why, in RATATOUILLE, there was an entire colony of rats without a single female.

Cause cartoon rats don't have genitalia to begin with...And next time you want to make a point, don't start with an obnoxious statement like, "The pervasiveness of the lack of clue on this point is interesting..."

You are absolutely correct. The first time it really hit me that the "default person" was male was thinking back to the Sesame Street of my childhood. Here these liberally minded folks went way out of their way to give us all races and genders in every possible role, usually against type.

Plus muppets.

Every single muppet was male. Every one. Even Big Bird who I thought was a girl was actually a guy.

And no one on the show noticed. I didn't notice. It wasn't until many, many years later that it occurred to me.

Jesus, mark, good point. Here I am being all full of myself with my keen insights into media representations of gender, and I miss fucking SESAME STREET, easily the most important show for two entire generations. I had literally never noticed the point you raise. Because hey, I'm an educated white male... I don't HAVE to notice it.

Oh, and anonymous... cartoon rats don't have genitalia, but they have voices, bodies, and faces. If you don't think those carry gender markers, you're either not watching enough cartoons or not watching enough human beings. I'll take my point as conceded.

Your perception may be accurate, Noah, but the reasoning is not. In animation, this default person is of one gender because most animation is made for children, and having male and female characters brings the undertone of sex into the picture. In animation for girls, all the characters are usually female (My Little Pony, Strawberry Shortcake). I'm betting most of the Sesame Street characters were male because most of the puppeteers were.

Well, gwangung, that's the nice thing about white male privilege. We get to not even notice all KINDS of stuff like that. All these little assumptions and double standards work in our favor, but most of them do it invisibly, so we can still point at our achievements and say "I did all this with pluck and gumption and hard work!"

But yeah, John's larger point is entirely right; we have these assumptions about what a "normal" person is that are, in fact, totally abnormal.

Do you suppose that if I slip Tom Friedman a twenty, he'll link to the Crazification Factor?

Because that, my man, would make you the Winner of the Internets and the readers of the NYT op-ed section a lot smarter.

Hmm, perhaps we could ask for a Rogers-of-the-Week Club in the editorial room. Can anyone really write about the Republican primary without referencing the seminal text, I Miss Republicans? Face it, Ron Paul calls out for context and the air rifle on the roof IS the context.

We use farmers for 'default American' because the elites know New York ain't it, and can't come to terms with the undeniable fact that the average American works as payroll admin(Largest employment category, from BLS - administrative and office staff. Largest categories, admins, then accountants) and lives in a subdivision in Orange County(CA, FL, doesn't matter, pick one). Suburbia is the largest subclass of Americans.

Part of the problem is the extreme overrepresentation of rural areas in government, because of each state being allotted 2 Senators regardless of population. That is why farm subsidies will never go away.

The rural population is a lot higher than the Census figures show, because "migrant" workers -- and also permanently or semi-permanently settled workers with no papers -- are seriously undercounted. The same is true in the cities, though, and I don't know which way the proportion would change if they were properly counted.

What's really being obscured by all this is class. By defining people who do certain kinds of labor as "middle class" whether they have the characteristics and privileges of middle class or not: by undercounting and underrepresenting the parts of the working class we don't want to think about: by dividing the working class into false regional factions: by elevating real (good, right-wing farmers, when you can find them) working class Americans into cardboard saints and derogating other working class Americans as underclass and gangbangers and foreigners and giving yet other working class Americans the job of being stupid and repulsive (see "Blue Collar Comedy") -- we create an atmosphere where hardly any American would say, "we are the working class and we're getting screwed as a class and we could do something about it as a class."

I'm going to predict that somebody will read the above and be embarrassed for me, because I use the concept class. So outmoded -- everybody knows we're beyond that. Which is why income disparity grows and grows, and services and benefits shrink, except those related to -- oh, I can't say the ruling class.